The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

On average, the Northern states developed more rapidly than the Southern states. It is tempting to ascribe this to the traditional historical narratives and attribute the general difference to climate or slavery. However, a careful examination of the subtle differences between the states suggests that variations in their political institutions were the main culprit behind how differently they developed. Jeffrey Jensen, a former student of ours and now a faculty member at NYU, Abu Dhabi, did a very careful study of the differences in the size of the interchangeables, influentials, and essential groups across the original states.3 He understood that many thought the differences in development depended on slavery and climate and so he corrected for these possibilities. Jeff took the size of the slave population carefully into account just as he also took carefully into account how many frost-free days there were per year in each of the original thirteen states. He investigated the distinctions in electoral rules within the early American states that created different levels of dependency on a large or small coalition drawn from a large or small set of interchangeables. His discoveries may not only rewrite how we understand America’s early development, but they can also help us understand how to make our own modern democracy do better.